Syria's President Bashar-al Assad is claiming his government does not have chemical weapons and reports of an attack by his forces are "100 percent" fabrication.

Despite U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies' claims that the April 4 attack that killed more than 80 people came from the Assad regime, the president claims the attack was faked to justify an American strike on a Syrian air base last week.

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"Our impression is that the West, mainly the United States, is hand-in-glove with the terrorists," Assad said in an interview with Agence France-Presse. "They fabricated the whole story in order to have a pretext for the attack."

Assad even cast doubt on whether the victims were actually dead.

"We don't know whether those dead children were killed in Khan Sheikhun," he said. "Were they dead at all."

Claiming that there are " a lot of fake videos now," he insisted that his government gave up all chemical weapons in 2013. That runs counter to claims by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that attacks using chlorine in 2014 and 2015.

"There was no order to make any attack, we don't have any chemical weapons, we gave up our arsenal a few years ago," Assad said.

"Even if we have them, we wouldn't use them, and we have never used our chemical arsenal in our history."

The interview comes as the U.S. military says a misdirected airstrike this week killed 18 allied fighters battling the Islamic State group in northern Syria.

U.S. Central Command said Thursday that coalition aircraft were given the wrong coordinates by their partner forces, the predominantly-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, for a strike intended to target Islamic State militants south of their Tabqa stronghold.